Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always heard "Tabs for indenting, spaces for aligning."
These days just use expand tab, in an age of online code review tools etc it's just better not to have to configure every system to interpret tabs to your given number of spaces - just write the damn spaces into the file.
The entire point of "tabs to indent; spaces to align" is that you don't need to make sure everyone displays tabs the same way. If we are using that scheme and I have mine set to 4 spaces but you have yours set to 8, everything is fine. There is no problem there.